Gangster Bradley flees to Lanzarote

Gang thug Wayne Bradley has fled to Lanzarote after his release from high-security Portlaoise Prison.

The under-threat 36-year-old is understood to be staying at a male relative's apartment in the Canary Island where temperatures are due to hit 22 degrees today as he enjoys his first weeks of freedom after he completed a five-year jail sentence.

It is expected that Bradley will have to return to his Finglas home after spending some "chill-out time" in sunnier climes.

"Bradley is under threat from some of his former associates as well as a south inner city gang, so being abroad is the best place that he could be," a source said last night.

"However he will have to come home eventually and he would be best advised to keep his head down when he does."

Bradley had been in Portlaoise Prison since last January when he was transferred there after he got a severe hiding in the exercise yard of Mountjoy Prison which left him in hospital for a fortnight.

He had been moved into the general population of the jail from the relatively cushy regime at the training unit at Mountjoy Prison after the Herald revealed that he had been breaching the terms of his temporary release.

Jamie Griffin (21) from the Iveagh Trust flats in Dublin's south inner city and his equally violent brother, Leon (26), were the main protagonists in a savage assault on Bradley in an exercise yard in Mountjoy Prison on December 22 last.

Bradley served most of the final year of his sentence in Portlaoise with his older brother Alan 'Fatpuss' Bradley (41).

Wayne and 'Fatpuss' tried to carry out a raid on a cash-in-transit van carrying almost €900,000 in 2007 under the direction of slain gangster Eamon 'The Don' Dunne.

However, gardai were lying in wait at the Tesco Store at Celbridge, Co Kildare and the keys the gang had to open the van did not work.

Described in court as having a "borderline" IQ, Wayne acted as lookout in the failed heist.